Tribune's Julia Keller wins Pulitzer for feature writing

Tribune cultural critic and reporter Julia Keller won the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing Monday for what the judges called a "gripping, meticulously constructed account" of the April 2004 tornado that killed eight people in Utica, Ill.

"This is a really wonderful moment," said Keller, 47, as dozens of her colleagues cheered the announcement in the Tribune newsroom. "It's one of those times when a person like me, probably known for too many words, is speechless."

It was the 24th time the Tribune received journalism's highest honor and the paper's first Pulitzer for feature writing, an especially competitive category for which judges issued no award last year.

"It's just a spectacular achievement," said Tribune Editor Ann Marie Lipinski. "She took a 10-second period of time and really explained what it meant. That's a complex assignment. The level of technical and emotional detail in the story is extraordinary."

The 13,372-word story, published over three days in December, reconstructed the second-by-second terror of the evening nearly a year ago when the twister ripped through Utica's one-block downtown and leveled the Milestone bar. Eight people who had sought refuge in the basement of the bar were killed.

The seven-month assignment took Keller from the computer screens of National Weather Service forecasters to the living rooms of storm survivors. It was an assignment she didn't want.

Tribune Tempo section editor Tim Bannon said he had waited for the right moment to immerse a feature writer into a breaking news event. The Utica tornado, he said, had all he wanted: the caprice of the storm and the "taut drama" as a small town struggled to overcome the loss of life and property.

But Keller, dispatched to the scene several days after the fact, tripped over a sandbag and ripped her pants on her first visit. She found a story already thoroughly covered by daily news reporters and television crews. At first glance, all that remained for her were building ruins and Utica citizens so overwhelmed by media attention that some ran from her or called her names, including "bloodsucker."

"We really came to loggerheads," Keller said of her first discussions with editors. "What more was there to say?"

Steadily though, through dozens of visits to the town an hour and a half southwest of Chicago, Keller became fascinated by "the randomness of catastrophe." Steadily she won the trust of residents, including Shelba Bimm, a 65-year-old emergency medical technician who responded to the tragedy, and Lisle Elsbury, operator of Duffy's Tavern, where lucky customers were spared just doors down from the Milestone, where the tornado took its eight victims.

"There were so many stories to tell," Keller concluded in the midst of hundreds of interviews for the story. "They were incredibly resilient people and they are open for business, and they want people to know that."

After returning to the Tribune after yet another Saturday in Utica, Keller complained to researcher Brenda Kilianski after realizing she'd forgotten to note the color of the floor in Duffy's tavern. Keller mused that she'd just get the remaining details by phone. Kilianski invoked the name of one of Keller's favorite writers, Tom Wolfe, and slipped Keller a piece of paper on which she'd scrawled "WWTWD," for "What Would Tom Wolfe Do?"

She did. And that trip added another of the precise details that built the story: "At this time of day, though, with the sun going down and the room filling up, Elsbury was reminded of the reasons he loved running a bar. Toughest work he'd ever done, but Lord, he just loved the feel of the place. The laughter. The talk. The scrape of chair legs on the red-painted plywood floor."

The Pulitzers, awarded annually by Columbia University, are judged by a board of prominent journalists and academics.

Two newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, each won two Pulitzers Monday.

The Los Angeles Times won the public service award for exposing deadly hazards and racial injustice at a major public hospital and an international reporting prize for coverage of Russia's struggles with terrorism, economics and democracy. The Times is owned by Tribune Co., which also owns the Tribune.

The Wall Street Journal won the beat reporting prize for reports on cancer survivors and the criticism award for film reviews.

In perhaps the most surprising Pulitzer announcement Monday, the investigative reporting prize went to Willamette Week, a weekly paper in Portland, Ore. Nigel Jaquiss, 42, a former Wall Street oil trader, won the prize for exposing an ex-governor's secret sexual relationship with a teenage girl.

The work of the Pulitzer winners can be viewed online at www.pulitzer.org. Keller's series, "Wicked Wind," can be viewed at www.chicagotribune.com/utica.

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